End pink-washing: Companies should be earnest about gender equality

livemint.com:

Come Women’s Day, many companies jump onto the bandwagon of diversity and inclusion, often through well-crafted but clichéd advertisements that feature women overcoming regressive situations. A case in point is the new advertisement of a service company that advocates dignity of labour for women professionals who work in salons. The ad features a young salon professional wearing company colours who drives home in a car and has to face an angry younger brother, smarting from the ridicule he has been subjected to by “bade bhaiyyas" in their building.

The young boy recounts how the older boys brand his sister a “massage-waali," casting aspersions on her profession and insinuating that she can afford a car because of the “happy endings" she specializes in for customers. The young boy’s outburst leads to the daughter looking at her mother, who turns away. The woman slowly proceeds to unpack the biases inherent in the older boys’ narrative and observes how a woman’s success is accompanied by people’s thinking (soch) becoming narrower (chhoti).

All is well that ends well, with the boy smiling, having learnt the lesson! Such commercials trivialize the problem of female stigmatization, with their sexual innuendos and mechanistic solutions. This trivialization is evident in the suggestion that it is older boys who have primitive notions. In a sense, it normalizes the gender identities of the stigma perpetrators, suggesting that women do not stigmatize—a huge myth.